If blogging was easy, anyone could do it. Oh, wait…

Archive for the month “November, 2012”

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 23 million people who don’t have health insurance now will get it on one of the exchanges. More than 18 million of them will qualify for a federal subsidy averaging $6,000 a year per person.

Mathy Part Goes Here:

18 Million x $6,000 = $108,000,000,000

Englishy Part Goes Here:

“Federal Subsidies“: (n) pl; – Money the government takes from you in taxes so it can give it back to you in the form of grants to help offset the cost of the health insurance it is making you buy, which you can’t afford to pay on your own because your taxes are so high.

Explanationy Part Goes Here:

It’s okay, because it will always be $108 bil of someone ELSE’S money. For everybody. For everybody the costs will always be covered by somebody else’s (tax) money, which is why it’s free for everybody, even though the government has to subsidize your ability to pay for…the…free…uh…health……care…

O_º

(Sorry, it always seems to kind of break down around the “explanationy” part.)

Holy muthafuggin bajeezus, when I wrote this, it was only to use hyperbole to express how utterly ridiculous the idea is, and how utterly appalingly stupid it should sound to each and every even remotely rational soul capable of even the most rudimentary cognition.

It honestly never even occurred to me that the dumbass would actually TRY it.

How, honestly, in the name of all that is round and fulsome, do you NOT understand the devastating impact of imposing over a TRLLION dollars of new taxes on an already struggling working class?

At the SAME TIME that you are implementing policies which are driving employers to cut hours and drop benefits in order to stay in business? Oh, and your energy policies are sending the price of once-abundant electricity through the roof, and oh-by-the-way, gas is approaching $5 a gallon in many places?

Quick Review, here: A trillion is 1,000 billions. Or, 1,000,000 millions. The entire US population is hovering around a paltry 314 MILLION. Not wage earners, mind you, but every mouth-breathing consumer of all types from infants to old farts in nursing homes.

How. In. The. HELL do you expect to squeeze over a million million dollars out of 314 million people?

Oh, sorry, wait. What I meant to say was…over a million million MORE dollars than they are ALREADY PAYING?

So, let’s make everything cost more, while simultaneously taking away at least $2-3000 a year from the average family, all the while trumpeting how awesome your fiscal policy is, and oh my, isn’t is great how we kept those evil Tea-Partiers from getting into office?

Also know as, Economics for the willfully ignorant, or, as I like to call them, “Liberals.”

Here it is, folks. Plain and simple. If you have a $1.4 TRILLION deficit, as in, planned spending over and above what you expect to receive in income, then you’d have to increaseyour income (in this case, taxes) by $1.4 TRILLION if you ever want to break EVEN!

So, if you have a federal government that hasn’t passed a federal budget in over four years, who thinks that things like “continuing resolutions” and “unfunded liabilities” are just an a-okay way to run the show, who continues to maintain that we can’t “afford” any spending cuts because OMG-You-hate-grandma-and-want-her-to-die, and whose only plan for solving this problem is to “tax the rich,” then you are, and let me see if I can come up with an appropriately descriptive term here….uhmmm, OH, I know:

Completely fucked.

And remember, that would just be to stop the bleeding, to keep the hole from getting any deeper. Any talk of paying off the existing $16 Trillion in national debt would have to be an entirely separate and additional conversation.

The reality of it, of course, should be patently obvious to any but the most self-deluded, braindead, dumb-ass muthafuckin’ social reject (again, as I like to call them, “Liberals”): You cannot pay off our debt, or solve our deficit problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. You HAVE TO STOP SPENDING SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY.

And yes, so, we put forth a couple of pretty hardass, ball-busting economics powerhouses to do just that. And they and their ilk were summarily defeated in favor of the “We want our stuff, and we want it for free, and we want it now, and if we don’t get it we’ll throw ourselves down and have a tantrum like a demon-child in the candy aisle of Wal-Mart” crowd pleasers.

And yes, this is probably the most profanity I’ve ever posted on the internet at one time, because I’m just that damn pissed off.

I had a gentleman of color in my office the other day (or, as I like to call him, a black dude), who was just giddy and bubbly and beside himself that Obama had been re-elected. When I tried bring up all the problems and economic Bad Things going on, pretty much all he could do was grin like the cat that ate the canary and insist, “Obama’s gonna fix it.” I’m not kidding. That is a direct quote. Try to pin him down on specifics, and he gets all vague, talks about generalities, points out quite eruditely the problems, but his only really solution was, “Obama’s gonna fix it.” He couldn’t tell you how, or why he was so confident despite the fact that Obama hadn’t managed to fix it during the LAST four years, but he just knew. He had faith. It was The Obama.

How do you possibly face that kind of blind idealism, completely unassailable by anything resembling fact or reality? It really does feel like a cult.

So, yeah. We are so screwed, and enough of the country doesn’t care, just wants their stuff, and they want it for free, and how dare you even suggest we defund PBS or the National Endowment for the Arts, or National Education Assocation, or any of a million other useless boondoggle pork projects. Hater.